When it comes to swapping shirts at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday evening, Tom Pope is not exactly counting his chickens. “If the Man City players have had a look at what I’ve said, they’ll probably tell me to bugger off,” the Port Vale captain says, laughing, referring to his comments on social media after watching back England’s Nations League defeat by the Netherlands in June, when he described John Stones as “soft” and “a target man’s dream”, saying he would love to play against the defender every week because he would have a field day.
Not for the first time Pope’s tweets catapulted him into the centre of a storm but six months on and before facing Manchester City in the FA Cup third round, the striker unapologetically stands by his words.
“One hundred per cent,” Pope says. “It was tongue-in-cheek, saying [I’d score] 40 goals a season. But every single footballer has got their strengths and weaknesses. John Stones is a world-class centre-half and his technical ability is second to none but what I do before a game is I look at the two centre-halves and go ‘Right, who is the weaker of the two?’ And I try to play on the weaker one. It is old-fashioned percentage play. If I play on him, I’ll win 80% of my headers.
“If I had a choice of [playing against] John Stones or Virgil van Dijk, I’d go and sit on John Stones. He is physically not the strongest centre-half. He is a ball-playing centre-half. That is not a criticism of him but as a target man, if you are Andy Carroll or Peter Crouch, they would all do the same thing and try and bully him and rough him up. I’d stand by that.
“I don’t think it was overly critical. I just pointed out the physical side of his game wasn’t one of his strengths and that it is something I can prey on. As a target man, if you look at a small footballing centre-half, you are licking your lips thinking: ‘I’m going to rough him up and cause some damage.’ That is when the team have to play to your strengths; there is no point trying to play against Man City trying to out-pass them because you’d get mullered.”
Pope relishes the blood and thunder of battle and lists Harry Maguire, Aden Flint and Sami Hyypia, whom he faced when Crewe took on Liverpool in 2008 before coming away with Daniel Agger’s shirt as a memento, as some of his toughest opponents over the years. But Pep Guardiola’s side, Pope says, will prove a different proposition.
“This Man City team are probably something else,” he says. “Not one person on the planet is going to fancy us to get anything from the game – not even us – and sometimes when there is no pressure on the game, you can have a little feelgood factor about yourselves. You just go out there and try to do the best you can and try not to be embarrassed. And sometimes strange things can happen.”
Unsurprisingly Pope does not take himself too seriously. When his Stones comments were dug up at the start of December, Pope referred to himself as a “carthorse”. The striker is a self-deprecating character and throughout this almost hour-long conversation his searing honesty is refreshing and endearing but he knows that his tongue – his tweets, to be precise – have landed him in hot water.
Last month the 34-year-old served a one-match ban for abusing Crewe fans after being found in breach of the Football Association’s Rule E3, and has had to stump up thousands of pounds in fines after three separate charges, two from the FA and one from the League Two club. “My wife is at the end of her tether with it. Everybody keeps telling me you need to come off [social media] but I love interacting with people. If I reported everybody who abused me, there would be nobody left on Twitter.”
Pope was brought up a mile from Vale Park and a boyhood supporter, going back to the days when his grandfather, Joe, would push him and his brother under the turnstile. These days Pope lives a 10-minute walk from the stadium and is Vale’s longest-serving player. After scoring almost 150 goals across 500 league career appearances he is comfortable in his own skin.
“I know what I am, I’m the slowest footballer in the world,” he says. “I’ll come last in any running race but I also know what my strengths are and, if you play to my strengths, I know I am a handful for anybody. When opposition managers and centre-halves are coming off after games shaking your hand and saying: ‘Flipping hell, what a battle or you’ve battered us,’ you know you have still been effective. I’m just an old-fashioned centre-forward. I don’t try to do anything I can’t do. I’m not going to start trying to take people on. I’ll try and get hold of the ball, win my headers and bring people into play.”
At 19 Pope ditched a nine-to-five job glazing windows and took a pay cut to sign for Crewe on £200-a-week, seven years on from them releasing him as a boy and after four years on the non-league circuit with Biddulph Victoria and Sneyd FC, a Sunday League team his father, Rob, managed for years. “When you are 15 and scoring goals, people are kicking lumps out of you.”
Few of City’s superstars will have had such a similar grounding. “No, but they have all got big houses so. if any of them ever need any windows doing, then maybe I’ll give them a call,” Pope says, breaking into laughter. “You’d go up for a header and land on the floor and they’d stamp on you while you’re down. My old man would always say, ‘Get up, get yourself up.’ You don’t want to give the opposition any thought that you might be weak or that they might be bullying you or have got the better of you. You just get back up and go again.”
That will be Pope’s mantra against City, along with sticking to his guns. “I’m not going to be robotic. That’s what they try to do now, they try to silence people. Anthony Joshua, when he’s doing media, I think a lot of it is stage-managed and scripted to keep fans on side. With me, I’ll just say what I think. If we’ve had a 5-0 drubbing the media are always asking for me after because I’ll be honest and not beat round the bush. I’m not going to be silenced. There are a lot worse people on the planet than Tom Pope.”